The mood has taken a dark and intolerant turn in France since the National Rally’s (NR) victory in the first round of voting in the parliamentary elections last weekend. The left and Macron’s centrists have not accepted their reverse with good grace. On Sunday evening there were spontaneous protests in several cities, including Bordeaux, where police had to use tear gas to disperse an angry crowd of 200.
In Cherbourg on Monday, a gang of Antifa assaulted Nicolas Conquer, a candidate for the wing of the centre-right Republicans that has allied with NR. He said later that it was another sign of the ‘normalisation of political violence by the extreme left’. Last month a candidate from NR suffered a minor stroke after being assaulted on the campaign trail.
Some vote for the NR simply to spite this elite
On Monday, a group of well-known rappers published a song calling on voters to get behind the left-wing Popular Front coalition in Sunday’s second round. The rappers called Marine Le Pen a ‘bitch’ and among other lyrics were ‘Jordan you’re dead’, a reference to the NR president Jordan Bardella. Another line went ‘If the fascists get through, I’ll take out a big gun’.
France’s academic and cultural elite have also called on voters to reject the NR on Sunday’s second round. The Avignon arts festival wants people to mobilise against Le Pen’s party, and France Universités, an association of 74 higher education institutions, has issued a press release stating the ‘real and unprecedented’ threat to ‘universal and humanist values’.
The NR would have anticipated a response of such ideological and physical violence. It is characteristic of a bourgeoise elite that insults but makes no attempt to understand why some 12 million of their fellow citizens voted for Le Pen’s party, three times more than backed them in the 2022 elections.
Some vote for the NR simply to spite this elite. They can no longer stomach these panjandrums, lecturing them from their pulpits while turning a blind eye to the anti-Semitism and anti-Republicanism of some of the left.
Last week, Jean-Luc Melenchon – the man who next week could be prime minister – was asked if he disapproved of his supporters brandishing placards with slogans such as ‘one dead cop = one less vote for the NR’ and ‘everyone hates the police’. He derided the question as ‘absurd’, retorting: ‘We’re allowed to laugh, aren’t we?’
On Sunday night, Melenchon appeared on a platform in Paris alongside one of his MEPs, Rima Hassan, her ubiquitous keffiyeh round her shoulders. During her European election campaign, Hassan was interviewed by police about possible apology for terrorism after comments about Israel. She also called for an ‘uprising’ across France in support of Palestine.
What has probably taken Le Pen by surprise is the way in which Emmanuel Macron and his ministers have thrown in their lot with the left-wing Popular Front. It has surprised many outside the National Rally. Centre-right Republicans have expressed their revulsion at the alliance, described by one of their senators, Stéphane Le Rudulier, as ‘morally insupportable and democratically abject’.
‘La coalition des Tartuffe’ was the headline of the editorial in Tuesday’s centre-right Le Figaro. The word ‘Tartuffe’ comes from Molière’s play of the same name and means a hypocrite who feigns virtue.
The editorial pointed a finger at Macron and his prime minister, Gabriel Attal, and asked how they could back a party that includes Danièle Obono, who in October last year described Hamas as a ‘resistance movement’. Or what about Raphael Arnault, who is alleged to have once threatened a feminist with death and is on a police list as a threat to national security?
It was only a few weeks ago that Macron and Attal excoriated the Socialist party for forming a coalition with Melenchon’s la France Insoumise. The president said that Leon Blum, the 20th century Jewish Socialist prime minister, would be ‘turning in his grave’. Attal, who has Jewish heritage, called the coalition an ‘accord of shame’. Now he has joined it. Why?
Because while Macron and Attal and Melenchon may differ economically, on the cultural question they are similar: they seek a ‘New’ France, one without the provincial working class. Melenchon feels betrayed by them because they chose Le Pen and not him; Macron abhors them because they remind him of his own provincial roots in Amiens.
Bardella admitted he was surprised to see Macron and Melenchon partner up. It was an ‘alliance of dishonour in either direction’, he added, a reference to Melenchon’s furious attacks on the president in recent years. Last month, he raged against Macron’s ‘insults and contempt’, saying that the French have ‘had enough’.
Recent election results prove that they have indeed had enough of Macron’s contempt. Millions of French have also had enough of the cant and cravenness of so many of their political and cultural elite. That is why they ignore the insults and the intimidation and vote for the National Rally,
If Bardella is the next prime minister, the elite will have only themselves to blame.
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